App of the Week: Fantastical [Mac]

Fantastical is a calendaring app for the Mac that makes entering appointments quick and easy. The idea behind Fantastical is that you can enter your appointments using natural language. Open up the entry dialog via either the toolbar or a key combination, and just type naturally. Fantastical takes care of the rest. For example, if you type “Meet with Joe at the office on Thursday at noon,” Fantastical will plug all of the appointment details into the correct slot in a calendar entry, using a slick user interface.

Fantastical acts as a front end to your choice of calendars, including iCal, BusyCal, Entourage, or Outlook. You can also use your iCloud, MobileMe, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar accounts. That doesn’t mean that Fantastical doesn’t have a UI display of its own. If you click on the Fantastical icon in your menubar, you’re presented with a very attractive calendar, as you can see in the screenshot below.

You can customize the display to control the number of events that are displayed, and clicking on an event brings up details of that event. You can then click an “Edit” button, and easily modify the details of the event.

Fantastical also provides convenient search functionality, right from the menubar. I’ve tried it out with a search term that I knew had entries from over a year ago, and it found those almost instantly.

Fantastical currently sells for $19.99 on the developer’s website, or in the Mac App Store. That might seem to be a bit steep for a calendaring app, but Fantastical is one of those apps that has that special “something” when you start to use it.

Hello, I'm Evan. I write about tech from my perspective – that of the average tech geek, sometimes with my lawyer glasses on. You can also find me on Twitter and at my real-life job as a lawyer. MORE ABOUT ME.

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